Manish Bapna

Manish Bapna believes that the path to solving global climate change runs straight through China, which is why the World Resources Institute is putting so much effort into working closely with the country and its leaders.

Manish Bapna is the executive vice
president and managing director of World
Resources Institute (WRI), where one of his
priorities is deepening WRI’s involvement
in China. WRI first began working in China
in the late 1980s, concentrating on helping
create cleaner transportation systems in cities
and on finding investors for small- and
medium-size companies that sell environmentally
friendly products and services.
Two years ago WRI opened an office in Beijing,
its first office outside of Washington,
D.C. The organization has now broadened
its work in China to include climate change
and water.

Bapna brings a great deal of global experience
to this work. Before joining WRI, he was
the executive director of the nonprofit Bank
Information Center (BIC), which promotes
sustainability in the projects and policies of
international financial institutions. Before
joining BIC, Bapna was a senior economist
and task team leader at the World Bank,
where he led multidisciplinary teams in designing
and implementing community-driven
water, watershed, and rural development
projects in Asia and Latin America.

WRI focuses on policy research and analysis,
working with government, business, and
NGOs. With more than 200 employees and
an annual budget of about $28 million, WRI
has been an important behind-the-scenes
player, helping Belize protect its ocean reefs
and prodding the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency to create new regulations for biofuel
greenhouse gas emissions.

In this interview with Stanford Social
Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric
Nee, Bapna explains the deliberative way
that WRI went about setting up its Beijing
office, the challenges of working with the
Chinese government, and the lessons WRI
has learned from working in China that other
organizations can benefit from.

Eric Nee: Until recently World Resources
Institute had only one office, your headquarters
in Washington, D.C. Why did you
open a second office in China?

Manish Bapna: Over the past decade there
has been a fundamental shift of economic
and political power away from the United
States and the West to countries like India, Brazil, and in particular, China. One striking
example would be China’s central role in the
Copenhagen climate talks, where Europe
was largely sidelined.

It’s not a stretch to say that the development
choices China makes over the next 20
years are going to profoundly shape the future
of the planet. So we believe that to deal with climate change it is absolutely essential
to engage proactively with China.

This is also true for a wide range of other
global environmental issues—for example,
China’s appetite for commodities. WRI has
a major forest program, and we recognize
that to find more effective ways to protect
the world’s forests, we need to deal with the
buyers. And one of the biggest buyers of forest
products is China.

So why can’t we influence Beijing from
Washington, D.C.? The main reason we
opened an office in Beijing is the complexity
of working in China. Not only are there
time, linguistic, and cultural barriers, but
understanding the political economy of
how decisions are made, and engaging effectively
in those processes, is not easy to
do from afar.

There are many environmental issues that
you could tackle in China. How did you decide
what to concentrate on?

We have been active in China for quite
some time, but this represented a whole
new ballgame. So after making the decision
that we wanted to deepen our presence in
China, we spent at least a year talking with
government officials, Chinese NGOs, international
think tanks, and multinational
companies trying to understand what the
opportunities in China were for WRI. What
value can we bring? Whom should we partner
with? What are some of the legal issues
for how we scale our presence in the country?
The process was crucial for being able
to articulate our identity in China.

In addition, we decided to appoint a Chinese
country director and to hire primarily
Chinese staff. That was important in bridging
the cultural gap that otherwise would have
existed. We also thought it was important to
have non-Chinese staff in our Beijing office
who can offer lessons from other countries.
This bridge building is seen as particularly
useful from a Chinese perspective. We also
set up an advisory committee to help ensure
that our priorities and strategies were relevant
to the Chinese.

What issues did you end up focusing on?

We asked ourselves three basic questions.
First, what are China’s most important environmental most interested in? And third, given our expertise
and skills, where can WRI add the
greatest value? We decided, for example, not
to work on forestry. We have quite a bit of
capacity in this area, but there were a lot of
organizations already working on forestry
issues in China and it was not clear what
more we would add. We chose to concentrate
on water and climate change because
it was clear what value we could add, and because
these areas embrace both economic
development and environmental issues. We
did not want to focus exclusively on climate
change, because it’s perceived in China to be
largely a global issue. So we balanced that by
selecting an issue that was of significant domestic
interest within China, which is water.
It was important for WRI to be perceived as
understanding and responding to the day-to-day
pressing challenges facing the country.
challenges? Second, what nearterm
issues are Chinese decision makers.

How has WRI had to change in order to be
effective in China?

We work actively to promote good environmental
governance around the world, framed
by the universal principles of transparency,
inclusiveness, and accountability. We
recognize that how these principles are put
into practice will vary quite a bit from country
to country. And quite candidly, we’re still
struggling over how to advance these principles
in China.

We’ve found that there isn’t as much receptivity
to these issues in China if we try to
address governance head on. But if we
frame these issues in the context of specific
environmental challenges, like water, we
can have considerably more traction. For
example, we’re developing a water scorecard
that can provide people living near a
body of water with basic information on the
health of the lake or the river system. This
information can be used by the government
to evaluate its own performance and by the
public to hold local government and businesses
accountable for keeping that water
body healthy.

Interestingly, China has strong environmental
policies in place on paper. The real
challenge is ensuring compliance with these
policies at the local level. By creating tools
like the water scorecard we can begin to address
some of the environmental governance
challenges that underpin many of the
problems that China faces. We are trying to
focus on solutions rather than problems.

There’s a terrific piece of advice that I
received while we were developing this
strategy: Be neither a panda hugger nor a
dragon slayer. What that means is that we
try to stay true to our values, but find ways
that are not directly confrontational. We’re
often asked to comment on China’s environmental
policy positions, especially on
climate change. So striking a balance between
commenting on their positions and
building a working, trust-based relationship
with the Chinese officials can be tricky. But
at the end of the day, when we have to think
about how we will respond to what China is
doing, our core value of maintaining independence
informs what we do. I would argue
that the Chinese government actually
values and respects an independent view if
it is premised on strong analysis.

Which plays to WRI’s strengths.

Right. WRI’s focus is nicely aligned with
China’s goal of scientific development and
the values that their society places on sound
science and analysis. Most Chinese government
officials are engineers and scientists
and that plays to the value proposition that
we bring to China. For example, in China
there’s a premium placed on in-depth analysis,
which results in an interesting difference
in how we communicate and engage
with policymakers. We were struck that
Chinese policymakers actually prefer
lengthy, rigorous reports, and that these reports
are often read carefully. It’s striking to
contrast this with our communication efforts
in the United States, where we spend
quite a bit of effort distilling our work into
two-page summaries for U.S. policymakers.

What has been your biggest success since
opening your Beijing office?

China is a huge and complex country, and
the most that a relatively small organization
like WRI can do is to facilitate new, more
sustainable approaches to development. So
our theory of change has been to focus on
creating pilot projects that demonstrate new
models or approaches to a more ecologically
sustainable and socially inclusive approach
to growth. If these pilots are successful, they
can be easily replicated or scaled.

One of our projects that we are most excited
about is helping the Chinese cement industry measure and manage its greenhouse
gas output. China is the leading emitter
of carbon dioxide in the world. The cement
sector alone accounts for about 15
percent of China’s emissions, or 3 percent to
4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
Given the rapid pace of urbanization in China,
this is going to increase if left untouched.
We played an important role in supporting
the government’s planning agency requirement
that cement companies measure their
energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

You can manage and reduce only what
you measure. A few years ago we worked
with the World Business Council
for Sustainable Development to
create a measurement tool called
the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
The Chinese government mandated
that this protocol be used by all 5,000 cement companies in China. If
the program is successful it can serve as a
model for measuring greenhouse gasses in
other carbon-intensive sectors such as steel
or aluminum.

Earlier in the year, the Chinese government,
as part of the International Climate
Negotiations, made a commitment to reduce
the carbon intensity of its growth by
40 percent to 45 percent by the year 2020,
relative to 2005 levels. They are actively
seeking opportunities to reduce energy use,
especially in their heavy industry sectors.

Why is China so aggressively cutting
emissions?

They are doing this for many reasons, to reduce
cost, to address energy security challenges,
and to demonstrate to the world
that they are responsibly trying to tackle the
climate change problem. For those working
on environmental and social causes, framing
these issues in a way that is aligned with
China’s national economic priorities is essential.
So we framed our work on climate
change as an opportunity to create high-quality
jobs, improve energy security, and
reduce costs. We find that provides much better traction with the government than if
we talk about greenhouse gas reductions. It
is no different in the United States. At the
end of the day, national interests matter,
and we need to think about how to connect
or align our issues with national interests.

China appears to be embracing green
energy much faster than the United States
and most other countries.

Thirty years of economic growth that has
averaged around 10 percent a year has created
tremendous change. It is difficult for
those of us in the United States to fully appreciate
this pace of change. In
the past year more money has
been invested in clean energy in
China than in any other country.
China has significantly scaled up
wind production and is actively deploying new solar technologies. Energy
efficiency is a national priority.

Let me give you one anecdote. About two
years ago, I accompanied one of our colleagues
to an appliance store in China. We
were shopping for a washer and dryer and
wanted to see the efficiency ratings for those
machines. It was virtually impossible to find
any information about how efficient a washing
machine was. Today, that information is
available for almost every household appliance.
It is remarkable how quickly the environmental
issue is moving in China, not just
in policy and investment, but also in public
awareness and purchasing decisions, especially
in the larger cities. One needs to remember
that China is many countries. There
are the rich cities, like Beijing and Shanghai,
which are more similar to New York and
Washington, D.C., than they are to the rural
parts of China. But there are also many poor
areas. We shouldn’t forget that China is still
a developing country, with 36 percent of the
population still living on less than $2 a day.

At this point, most of the new technologies
and solutions for solving environmental
problems originate in the West. Do you see
a time when China will provide the solutions
for the West?

We are going to have to rely on the ingenuity
of the engineers and the scientists in
India and China to solve many of our problems.
In recent years India has developed
the $2,000 car, the $35 tablet computer, and
the $30 cataract surgery. Because they have
such a significant but relatively poor population,
they have taken existing products
and driven down the cost radically. It’s a
concept called frugal innovation. There is
an incredible opportunity in these countries
to turn their creativity toward driving down
the cost of the technologies that are needed
to solve many of the world’s most pressing
environmental problems.

Is that happening?

It is starting to happen. If you look at the
production cost for wind or carbon capture
and storage in a developing country such as
China, compared with Germany or the
United States, there is a big difference. But
we need more dramatic reductions in costs.
And the nature of the markets in China and
India, where you have significant populations
that have relatively less purchasing
power, can help create the incentives for
those radical redesigns.

What’s clear from our conversation is that
unless you’re in China interacting with
people daily, it’s easy to have misconceptions
about what’s going on there.

Yes. One of the things that I’ve been particularly
struck by is the considerable suspicion
that still exists between the United States
and China, which might even be widening. If
any major global challenge is going to be
tackled in the near future, then building trust
between the two countries is essential.

We’ve been trying to construct mechanisms
for the exchange of ideas and perspectives
in both directions, not only to ensure
that ideas and solutions from the rest
of the world are channeled to China, but to
ensure that Chinese perspectives and solutions
are shared with the rest of the world.
The Chinese are keen for such a platform
because they believe they have much to
contribute. We believe such a platform can
help build trust. And that trust is critical if
more cooperation between China and the
rest of the world is to emerge.